Summer Ghosted Us Again

Every year it's the same. The first genuinely nice day shows up in the Midwest, we all breathe a sigh of relief like we survived something, and then somehow, it's mid-August and someone in the group chat is already asking about pumpkin spice. It doesn't feel like summer left. It feels like it came and went and lasted about a week.

And here in Wisconsin, it's not like we even get that much of it to begin with. We get maybe a handful of truly perfect weeks, sandwiched between a spring that can't decide what it's doing and a fall that shows up uninvited in September. Even the summer days we do get come with an asterisk, half of them so humid the air feels like it's fighting you just to walk to the mailbox. So, when someone says summer flew by, what they really mean is: the two good weeks flew by, and we spent the rest of it sweating through our clothes wondering if it was worth complaining about the cold six months ago.

But it's not just a Midwest problem, and it's not just a summer problem. It's an age problem, and there's actual research behind why.

Psychologists have spent years trying to explain why time seems to speed up the older we get, and it comes down to how our brains handle new versus familiar experiences. When something is new, your brain works hard to record every detail, which is why a totally new experience can feel like it stretched on forever while it was happening. But once something becomes routine, your brain stops paying close attention to it. It knows what's coming, so it stores less of it. Fewer details get recorded, which means when you look back, there's less there to look back on. That's the trick. It's not that time actually sped up. It's that your brain simply didn't bother keeping many souvenirs.

There's also a math problem working against us. A year when you're five years old is a massive chunk of your entire life so far, something like a fifth of everything you've ever experienced. A year at fifty is a tiny sliver by comparison, barely a blip. Every year we live makes the next one feel proportionally smaller and faster, whether we like it or not.

Put those two things together and you get exactly what happens every single August: a summer full of the same routines, the same commute, the same three restaurants, the same weather complaints, and suddenly it's over and you can't account for where it went. Nothing was memorable enough to leave a mark.

But listen up, this isn't entirely out of our hands. The solution to time slipping by unnoticed isn't more time. It's more newness. A different road on the drive home. A restaurant you've never tried. Saying yes to the thing you'd normally skip because it felt like too much effort on a Tuesday. None of it needs to be dramatic. Your brain just needs something to actually pay attention to, so it has something to hand back to you later.

So, if this summer already feels like it slipped through your fingers, you're not imagining it, and you're not alone. But there's still time to make the next few weeks feel like something instead of a blur. Go to that bloody mary breakfast. Take the different route home. Enjoy time with friends at the annual Cornhole Tournament. Say yes to the thing on the fence that may be a smidge out of your comfort zone. Give your brain something worth keeping, something to remember, before the pumpkin spice lattes are everywhere we look!

P.S. I will admit I am a fan of the pumpkin spice, but can we at least wait with the Christmas decorations?

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